Symposium: Advanced facilities for the ecological research: the European Research Infrastructures

Metz, France, 24 November 2022.

The European Commission is strongly promoting the establishment and operation of European Research Infrastructures (ERIs), funded by the Member States, as key components of the scientific research landscape supporting the global competitiveness of European research communities. ERIs are aimed at offering high quality data and advanced facilities to European scientists, with particular attention towards early career researchers, promoting innovation, technology transfer to industries, and citizen engagement in science.

In the area of Ecology, some ERIs have already been established as European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC), and are currently operational, whilst others are in the process of becoming so. Globally, the landscape of European Research Infrastructures offers monitoring sites and facilities covering all types of environmental domains, i.e., terrestrial, freshwater, transitional and marine waters and key research areas, such as those dealing with biodiversity organisation, conservation and restoration, with ecosystem processes and carbon sequestration, water and energy fluxes or with agroecosystems.

On 24 November 2022, LifeWatch ERIC is organising the Symposium: “Advanced facilities for the ecological research: the European Research Infrastructures”.
Here, we propose an expert panel discussion, with leading scientists from advanced ERIs supporting European scientific research on biodiversity and ecosystems, such as LifeWatch ERIC, the European e-Science Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research, the ecosystem component of ICOS ERIC, the Integrated Carbon Observation System, eLTER RI, the Integrated European Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone ad socio-ecological Research, DiSSCo, the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, Danubius-RI, the International Centre for Advanced Studies on River-Sea Systems, EMSO ERIC, the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory, and JERICO-RI, the Joint European Infrastructure of Coastal Observatories. Presenting their key integrated research facilities to the SFE2 GFÖ EEF Joint Meeting – “Ecology & Evolution: New perspectives and societal challenges“, these infrastructures offer to the relevant ecological research community of practice, a view on their data, services and other types of research resources, on the opportunities for engagement and on the possibilities to propose new types of data and services to be promoted, collected and developed by the ERIs.

The proposed discussion will focus on the major scientific and societal challenges of contemporary times and on the greatest threats faced by biodiversity, ecosystem services and societal benefits, in the context of natural and anthropic pressures, including climate change impacts. The leading scientists involved in the discussion will present how each ERI will commit to collaboratively tackle these issues, supporting the creation of new multidisciplinary and cross-domain knowledge towards facilitation of the implementation of current policies at all levels and the creation of new ones. They will also illustrate how scientists can access their integrated research facilities.

Keynote speakers:
Alberto Basset, University of Salento and LifeWatch ERIC
Christos Arvanitidis, Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR) and LifeWatch ERIC
Dario Papale, University of Tuscia and ICOS ERIC
Michael Mirtl, Environment Agency Austria and eLTER RI
Niels Raes, Naturalis Biodiversity Center and DiSSCo
Adrian Stanica, National Institute for Research and Development of Marine Geology and Geoecology (GeoEcomar) and Danubius-RI
Gabriella Quaranta, EMSO ERIC
Laurent Delauney, Ifremer and JERICO-RI
Rob J.J. Hendriks, Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality and Biodiversa+

Chairperson: Andreas Petzold, Juelich Research Centre, IAGOS and ENVRI-FAIR

Speakers will present their RIs, then they will illustrate the services and facilities that these RIs can provide to address major threats for biodiversity (e.g. alien species, habitat degradation and fragmentation etc) and tackle climate change impacts affecting ecosystem functioning and services. The discussion will be therefore an occasion to highlight multidisciplinary expertise and synergies on these key topics.

Workshop: e-Tools & resources to address key questions on Non-indigenous & Invasive Species

Metz Workshop

Metz, France, 21 November 2022.

LifeWatch ERIC ICT staff, in collaboration with scientists already engaged in developing research activities on non-indigenous and invasive species using LifeWatch ERIC’s Virtual Research Environment facilities, is organising the 4-hour computer-based Workshop: “e-Tools and resources to address key ecological questions on Non-indigenous and Invasive Species” from 14:00-18:00 in Room 13.
Interested attendees will be trained to access and use the Virtual Research Environments from their personal computers. The hands-on session will be introduced by an interactive session to guide the attendees on their first approach to the VREs and related e-tools.

The workshop is organised in the framework of the SFE2-GfÖ-EEF joint meeting “Ecology & Evolution: New perspectives and societal challenges“, on 21-25 November 2022 in Metz. It is being organised by the LIEC (University of Lorraine, CNRS) and other labs in northeastern France working in the fields of ecology and evolution.

Click here for more information.

Workshop description
Non-indigenous and Invasive Species (NIS) are considered one of the major threats to the ecosystem functioning and one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss. Despite the advances in the understanding of introduction pathways, mechanisms of bio-invasions, and impacts of invasive species, the effective management and control of NIS still lag behind their spread.
For such reason, LifeWatch ERIC has developed e-science tools to assist researchers, stakeholders, and citizens in deepening knowledge and obtaining rapid responses to mitigate the risks and impacts of NIS in the terrestrial and aquatic domains.
This joint effort has resulted in the development of a series of ICT facilities and workflows to support scientists in running five case studies (CS) on NIS, tackling different key aspects, including:

  1. the evaluation of their trophic habits (CS 1);
  2. the early-detection of NIS invasion and spread, through standard monitoring procedures and metabarcoding (CS 2 & 3);
  3. the development of keystone NIS species dispersion scenarios for terrestrial Mediterranean ecosystems (CS 4);
  4. the EUNIS habitat and ecosystem vulnerability (CS 5).

The five case studies and workflows are embedded into Virtual Research Environments (VREs) that provide a series of web-services made available through a user-friendly interface and the datasets and services produced through the case studies are accessible through the LifeWatch ERIC catalogue.
 
The workshop aims at presenting the LifeWatch ERIC VREs and e-resources developed for NIS research. During the workshop, the scientific case study leaders, together with the LifeWatch ERIC ICT team, will introduce the aims and analytical tools (e.g. models, computing facilities) included in each workflow. The presentation of the case studies and web-services realised will be followed by a hands-on session where the attendees can access the VREs.
 
AGENDA
14:00-14:05: General introduction (10 mins)
Chairs:
Christos Arvanitidis – Chief Executive Officer, LifeWatch ERIC
Juan Miguel González-Aranda – Chief Technology Officer/ICT-Core Director, LifeWatch ERIC
Alberto Basset – Service Centre Director, LifeWatch ERIC

14:05-14:25: General introduction to Tesseract (15 mins)
LifeWatch ERIC ICT team presentation: Antonio José Sáenz-Albanés – LifeWatch ERIC
 
14:25-15:00: Case Study 1: Evaluation of NIS trophic habits – Crustaceans (35 mins)
Scientific leader presentation: Raffaele De Giorgi – University of Salento, LifeWatch ERIC Service Center
Hands-on session
Questions and discussion
 
15:00-15:35: Case Study 2: Early-detection of NIS invasion and spread through standard monitoring procedures and metabarcoding – ARMS (35 mins)
Scientific leader presentation: Katrina Exter – Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ)
Hands-on session
Questions and discussion
 
15:35-16:10: Case Study 3: Development of keystone NIS species dispersion scenarios
for terrestrial Mediterranean ecosystems. – Ailanthus altissima (35 mins)
Scientific leader presentation: Carmela Marangi – Italian National Research Council (CNR), Institute for applied mathematics (IAC)
Hands-on session
Questions and discussion
 
16:10-16:30: Break (20 mins)
 
16:30-17:05: Case Study 4: The EUNIS habitat and ecosystem vulnerability. Biotope
(35 mins)
Scientific leader presentation: Julien Radoux (Catholic University of Louvain) and Heliana Teixeira (University of Aveiro)
Hands-on session
Questions and discussion
 
17:05-17: 40: LifeBlock (35 mins)
LifeWatch ERIC team presentation: Juan Miguel González-Aranda, Joaquín López-Lérida, and Ana Mellado-García (LifeWatch ERIC, ICT-Core)
Hands-on session
 
17:40-17:55: Essential Biodiversity Variables using Remote Sensing (15 mins)
Scientific leader presentation: Joris Timmermans – LifeWatch ERIC VLIC
Questions and discussion
 
17:55-18:00: Final Remarks and Conclusion (5 mins)

FAIR Data Day – Reusing data to advance science

FAIR Data Day

Utrecht, The Netherlands, 29 November 2022.

The FAIR Data Day 2022 is an event organised by the National Programme Open Science (NPOS) and Research Data Netherlands (RDNL), which aims to bring together the research & data steward communities in The Netherlands. The RDNL Dutch Data Prize will be awarded during the day.  

Join your peers, researchers, data stewards and research software engineers to exchange and learn more about the advantages of reusing data in daily research practice! 

Scientific programme

The FAIR Data event promises to be an exciting and thought-provoking day with motivational keynote speakers and interactive parallel workshop sessions showcasing good practices of FAIR implementation, that are selected from abstracts submitted by the research & data steward communities! During the day we will also award the RDNL Dutch Data Prize to an individual or team that has made great contributions to making research data FAIR. 

RDA 20th Plenary Meeting

RDA Meeting

Gothenburg, Sweden, 21–23 March 2023.

The Research Data Alliance will celebrate its 10th Anniversary Plenary Meeting on 21–23 March 2023 in Sweden, going back to where RDA was launched in March 2013. Following on from the success of the 19th Plenary meeting held in a hybrid format for the first time, P20 will take place in Sweden’s second-largest city – Gothenburg.

Hosted by Chalmers University of Technology, the University of Gothenburg and the Swedish National Data Service (SND), a three-day hybrid conference will once again bring together researchers, data scientists, policymakers, and data stewards from disciplines from all over the world to share new ideas and explore best practices in using data. 

RDA P20 will take place at the Lindholmen Conference Centre. The centre is located on the north side waterfront of the Göta Canal in Gothenburg. The venue offers a highly technological environment and opens its doors to many local and international events throughout the year. The waterfront offers breathtaking architecture with many cosy Swedish restaurants and cafes offering traditional food. The conference centre’s location in Gothenburg means that it is only a 4 minutes Älvsnabben ferry ride into the city centre.

Present and Future of Data Cubes discussion forum

Data cubes

Online, 7 December 2022.

Critical environmental information is today heavily under-used because it requires a high level of expertise and computing capacity. EO data is not yet a commodity and neither is environmental information.

How can we make monitoring systems that explain the effects of global warming on land cover changes and extreme weather (floods, droughts etc.) as simple to use and as popular as Google Maps or AccuWeather?

What have we learned so far from NASA’s MODIS, Google Earth Engine, Copernicus initiatives, and OpenEO.cloud?

In this live-streamed event organised by HorizonEurope’s Open-Earth-Monitor project, in which LifeWatch ERIC is partner, and OpenGeoHub, international experts and project partners will discuss how we can make environmental data derived from Earth Observations and field monitoring more usable, accessible and relevant to decision-makers and society.

REGISTER HERE!

Starting from the discussion of existing top-level solutions for the effective use of large EO data for real-world applications, we will explore open-source solutions that can process massive volumes of EO data in a more transparent and reproducible way.

On top of public services, commercial solutions can play a massive role: we will analyze and discuss existing commercial Data Cube services covering the whole of Europe and the whole world to understand what the best way to use them is for open, European projects.

Finally, the forum will give stage also to more in-depth discussions around cloud-optimized data formats and their applicability to store and share gridded, vector and tabular data.

Speakers will be soon announced!

About the EuroGeo Workshop 2022 in Athens

This event will take place within the EuroGEO workshop 2022 ‘Towards an integrated and convergent EuroGEO’ on 7 – 9 December 2022, in Athens, Greece.

EuroGEO combines the contributions of European members of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a partnership of more than 100 national governments, over 100 participating organisations and the European Commission. GEO envisions a future where decisions and measures for the benefit of humankind are informed by coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observations. 

The annual workshop brings together European players interested in and actively contributing to EuroGEO.

This year, the workshop is organised by the European Commission, the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation of the Hellenic Ministry of Development and Investments, and the Greek GEO Office operating within the National Observatory of Athens.

REGISTER HERE!

2nd FAIR Convergence Symposium

2nd FAIR Convergence Symposium

Leiden, The Netherlands, 24–26 October.

From 24-28 October, in the context of Leiden 2022: European City of Science, there will be a week dedicated to FAIR implementation and specifically to FAIR Digital Objects as the core ‘machine actionable units of information’ necessary to build an Internet and Web of FAIR data and services. The week features two closely related events: the 2nd FAIR Convergence Symposium (24-26 October) and the 1st International Conference on FAIR Digital Objects (26-28 October). The two events will explore the contention that the FAIR guiding principles, and their application through FAIR Digital Objects, are important steps to maximise the machine actionability of data and other information.

The co-organisers of the 2nd FAIR Convergence Symposium, CODATA and GO FAIR, agreed that this years’ edition will concentrate on smaller, high-priority, strategic and working meetings to encourage convergence on and implementation of FAIR, rather than convening a large open Symposium so soon after International Data Week and in the context of ongoing challenges for intercontinental travel.

Most of the meetings are organised as hybrid events, allowing for both in-person and online participation.

Service documentation for EOSC providers Workshop 1: Describing your service for onboarding

Description of services

Online, 9 November 2022.

On 9 November, from 13:00-15:00 CET, the EOSC Future project, in which LifeWatch ERIC is partner, is organising a free, open-to-all, hands-on, online workshop on “how to write good and effective descriptions of services”.

A service text description is crucial to both engage with your potential users and make your service discoverable. An optimal service description text should ideally be short and to the point, while still explaining what the service does, who it was developed for, and what benefits users will gain from adopting/using it. Description texts can be used for example during the onboarding of services in catalogues (such as the EOSC Marketplace or the ENVRI Service Catalogue), or in other contexts when you want to advertise a service to various end-user communities.

This training event is built on the materials and concepts originally developed by the ENVRI-FAIR WP6 for the ENVRI Community 2022 Summer School that took place last July.

Clear and comprehensive documentation is absolutely essential for a service to be discoverable and successfully used – both by existing and potential new target groups. There are many components of service documentation, including service catalogue entries, promotional materials, usage instructions and tutorials, technical specifications and richly commented code. As an example of the first of these, a brief service description is a required metadata item to be provided during the onboarding of a service into the EOSC Marketplace.

This event will start by giving an overview of documentation types, and discuss some strategies for creating sustainable and effective service descriptions. This will be followed by practical hands-on exercises focusing on how to prepare service descriptions following the requirements of the EOSC service onboarding protocol. So bring your own service use case along, and join an interactive and productive description writing session!

If you wish to participate, register by 7 November 2022. Agenda and registration form here.

e-IRG Workshop under Czech EU Presidency

e-IRG Workshop

Prague, Czech Republic, 12–13 December 2022.

The e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG) organises two open workshops every year, each under the auspices of the corresponding EU presidency. During the last years, the e-IRG Workshops have been organised as virtual events due to the Covid-19 pandemic, now the e-IRG Workshop under Czech EU Presidency will be organised as a face-to-face event bringing together all e-IRG stakeholder in Prague.

SESSIONS

1. Session “Coordination and collaboration among European e-Infrastructures – the e-IRG White Paper 202”

The pre-final version of the e-IRG White Paper 2022 will be presented comprising an analysis of responses to the guiding questions which has been sent to the e-Infrastructure initiatives and the further inputs from them will be presented, requesting feedback from the e-IRG major audiences, namely, the policy makers and funders (including the EC, both DG RTD and DG Connect), the e-Infrastructures themselves (commenting also on each others’ views), and the end users.

2. Session “Energy crisis and e-Infrastructures”

This session will deal with the current energy crisis and its impact on European e-Infrastructures.

3. Session “Data Infrastructures and Data Spaces”

Since Data Infrastructures, Spaces and Repositories are indispensable parts of the e-Infrastructure(s) serving the users and accomplishing the European Open Science policy a dedicated session at the e-IRG Workshop is organised. The presentations will span from from policies to the implementation. A main focus will be on the upcoming Common European Data Spaces and their interconnection with the existing data infrastructure landscape in the research domain.

4. Session “Interlinking – interaction between data, publications and PIDs”

Since Data Infrastructures, Spaces and Repositories are indispensable parts of the e-infrastructure(s) serving the users and accomplishing the European Open Science policy a dedicated session at the e-IRG Workshop is organised.

Ingrid Dillo, Coordinator of FAIR-IMPACT, in which LifeWatch ERIC is partner, will be part of a panel discussion, focused on “Data Infrastructures and Data Spaces”, which will address the upcoming thematic European Data Spaces and their interconnection with EOSC and the existing data infrastructure landscape in the research domain.

More information and regisration here.

Synchronisation Force 1st Workshop

Synchronisation Force 1st Workshop

Online, 8 November – 12 December 2022.

The Synchronisation Force 1st Workshop aims to discuss common challenges and priorities related to turning the FAIR principles into practice.

Four online collaborative sessions between the 21 and 24 November 2022 will assess the implementation of selected recommendations and ambitions from the Turning FAIR into Reality Report (2018), the FAIRsFAIR White Paper (2021), the SRIA (version June 2021) and EOSC Multi-Annual Roadmap (2023-2024).

They will be opened by an introductory session on 8 November and will conclude with a discussion session on 12 December.

The FAIR-IMPACT project (in which LifeWatch ERIC is partner) will invite key FAIR representatives of projects and initiatives in the EOSC framework to the Synchronisation Force 1st Workshop, who can actively engage in the various sessions.

Programme and registration here.

ENVRI Week 2023

ENVRI Week 2023

Leipzig, Germany, 30 January – 3 February 2023.

ENVRI week is the annual consortium meeting of the ENVRI-FAIR project, a week dedicated to Environmental Research Infrastructures such as LifeWatch ERIC. ENVRI week 2023 will host ENVRI-FAIR project-related sessions as well as several other sessions of the Board of European Environmental Research Infrastructures (BEERi) and the ENVRI Community.

After two years of online meetings, the last ENVRI week of the ENVRI-FAIR project will be held as a face-to-face meeting in Leipzig, Germany, from 30 January to 3 February 2023. Some plenary sessions might also be streamed or recorded, butl participants are strongly encouraged to join on-site. This page is your one-stop shop for anything related to the ENVRI Week 2023 from the programme to booking your accommodation.

Agenda
You can find an outline of the preliminary agenda here (pdf).
A detailed agenda for both the sessions and the workshops will be available soon.

Registration
Registration is now closed.